A
Literary Saloon
&
Site of Review.

Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs.

Contents:

Main

the Best

the Rest

Review Index

Links

to e-mail us:


support the site

the complete review - fiction

Ways of Going Home

by
Alejandro Zambra

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

- Return to top of the page -

Our Assessment:

B : nice, reflective novella

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Zambra at his best offers an intimate recognition of his central characters, and he can evoke a setting succinctly. He works confidently within his preferred formula, but we can't escape the conclusion that Ways of Going Home is overly self-referential, and lacking depth or acuity. It is a readable but ultimately frustrating story aimed, like Bonsai, at a young adult market." - Richard Gwyn, The Independent
  
  
• "Zambra finds an original way to evoke life in a time of oppression and political terror by turning his book inward, shifting between fiction and a sort of meta-memoir." - Chris Barton, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "Alejandro Zambra hat einen leisen, behutsam sich vorantastenden Roman geschrieben, für den die Übersetzerin Susanne Lange im Deutschen die richtige Tonlage findet. Sein Leitmotiv ist nicht die Klage, die Empörung, auch nicht die Freude über eine spät gewonnene Gewissheit, sondern der Zweifel, der beständig präsent ist; der Zweifel, ob die überlieferten Dinge auch stimmen und die erfundenen keinen Verrat bedeuten, der Zweifel, ob der Roman tauglich ist, die Wahrheit mittels Erfindung aufzudecken." - Karl-Markus Gauss, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
  
  
• "Zambra’s latest novel represents, I think, his deepest achievement. It is the most intricate of his experiments with brevity. (...) In this high-speed description, the novel might seem a minute study, a sketched memoir of the fallout from the Pinochet era. In fact, this small novel contains a surprising vastness, created by its structure of alternating chapters of fiction and reality (.....) Really, the meta­fictional is just a neutral mode like any other. It is capable of multiple uses. And in Ways of Going Home, Zambra uses the metafiction to create the most concision. It allows him to skip unnecessary scenes; to avoid composition of place -- to analyze his themes directly. It’s an instrument, therefore, not of modish skepticism but of truth-telling." - Adam Thirlwell, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Complex yet sophisticated, the novel places Zambra at the spearhead of a new Chilean fiction and sets him alongside other Latin American writers such as Colombia's Juan Gabriel Vásquez, who weave some of the continent's most difficult historical themes into an exciting modern art form." - Mina Holland, The Observer
  
  
• "Zambra raises thoughtful questions about expectations for and the limitations of the redemptive possibilities of art. Unfortunately, the conclusion feels like a shortcut, less satisfying than the observations of either the boy or the man creating him. Overall, though, this compelling book brings the experiences of a generation to the page with haunting emotion and beautiful prose in a fine translation" - Publishers Weekly
  
  
• "The novel has an air of insomniac attentiveness: a sharpened observation of daily routine, an accumulation of detail and interleaving of banality and profundity. Megan McDowell’s limpid and unfussy translation serves the book well. Zambra cannot simply be pigeonholed as a "Spanish-Language" writer. His concerns and influences are broader" - Adam O'Riordan, The Telegraph
  
  
• "(T)he book is deceptively slight and finely wrought: it is both a wistful look at Chile's recent political history and a metafictional reflection on the nature of writing." - Matt Lewis, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

- Return to top of the page -

The complete review's Review:

       In his third novella to be translated into English, Alejandro Zambra again presents a story that is also about storytelling. It begins with the Zambra-aged (the author was born in 1975) narrator describing his childhood in what was still Pinochet's Chile, in the mid-1980s, including the time around the 1985 earthquake. But in the present-day second section it becomes clear that this first section is part of the novel the author-narrator is working on. A third section returns to that novel, the setting now some two decades later, the narrator describing his encounter with one of the characters from his childhood, while the fourth section is again more directly from the author, describing his day-to-day life in the present.
       The narrator of the novel the author is writing is clearly just another version of himself, revisiting different times in his life. The present-day sections are just an extension of that, in a sense -- ostensibly 'more real' but only seeming so because of their immediacy; the author-narrator claims about the novel he is writing: "it's fiction" -- implying the present day sections are not -- but they're all just different levels of the same novelistically-treated reality. So, yes, Ways of Going Home is very much about recollection and storytelling, of taking experience -- past and present -- and (re)shaping it. From the basics of the actual writing of the novel-within-the-novel -- "I try out changes. From first to third person, from third to first, even to second", for example -- to the form in which he finally allows the story to unfold, he repeatedly makes readers aware of the many choices that are made in (re)presenting recollection and dealing with past -- the different 'ways of going home'.
       Ways of Going Home is also about the connections we have with people. The narrator re-connects with a girl he knew in the 1980s, Claudia -- admitting as he looks back on their childhood friendship:

We talked a lot. Sometimes I think I'm writing this book just to remember those conversations.

As for Pinochet, to me he was a television personality who hosted a show with no fixed schedule, and I hated him for that, for the stuffy national channels that interrupted their programming during the best parts.

So now I say I'm a writer, and when they ask what kind of books I write, I say, to avoid a long and uncertain explanation, that I write action novels; it isn't exactly a lie, since in all novels, even mine, things happen.

- M.A.Orthofer, 16 December 2012

- Return to top of the page -

Links:

• Farrar, Straus and Giroux publicity page
• Granta publicity page
• Anagrama foreign rights information page
• Suhrkamp publicity page

• Le blog d'Yspaddaden (French)
• Bookmunch
• California Literary Review
• La Cause Littéraire (French)
• The Coffin Factory
• counterpunch (scroll down for review)
• CríticaLiteraria (Spanish)
• Deutschlandradio (German)
• The Hairy Dog Review
• The Hispanic Reader
• The Independent
• Kirkus Reviews
• Letras Libres (Spanish)
• Library Journal (scroll down for review)
• Lire (French)
• The Los Angeles Times
• El Mercurio (Spanish)
• Neue Zürcher Zeitung (German)
• New Orleans Review
• The New York Observer (scroll down for review)
• Newcity Lit
• The Observer
• The Onion
• Publishers Weekly
• Quarterly Conversation
• The Rumpus
• Savidge Reads
• taz (German)
• The Telegraph
• Three Percent
• Tony's Book World
• La Tormenta en un Vaso (Spanish)
• Versatile (French)
• Vol.1 Brooklyn
• Words without Borders

• Bonsai
• Childish Literature
• Chilean Poet
• Multiple Choice
• The Private Lives of Trees

• See Index of Latin and South American literature

- Return to top of the page -

About the Author:

       Chilean author Alejandro Zambra was born in 1975.

- Return to top of the page -

© 2012-2024 the complete review

Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links